Page 52 of AMS.TER.strum

Me

CU later. x

Corrie

Ditto. x

She’ll be here!

Paradiso is magical as always. I love this former church with the great acoustics that I used to cycle outside as a teenager, never having imagined that I would be there to perform one day. Thanks to the tall ceilings, fitting some fifteen hundred people feels cosy instead of claustrophobic. But the real reason I can’t wait for tonight is to play for the one person in the crowd my mind and heart and songs will be laser-focused on.

We head for the stage entrance, cyclists and passers-by too busy to bother about us. Yet every time I look around, whenever I come back to Amsterdam, I keep searching for Mom and Dad. My rational mind repeats that it’s impossible, but some stubborn inner Luuk keeps ignoring it. And since I have no idea what they’d look like today, especially Mom, the images my mind conjures are from back then.

Sometimes it works. I might see a woman in the crowd, rushing to get into a shop to escape the rain like the one holding the huge red umbrella, entering the new knickknack shop on Leidseplein, as we were coming to the venue. And maybe Dad is on Max Euweplein, just through the alley not far from Paradiso, watching the chess players moving the giant pawns, ignoring the drizzle?

It’s as if someone has placed cartoon effigies of them at familiar places, behind windows, in the park, amongst the crowd, just in case I go there, on a sad treasure hunt for breadcrumbs of those happy memories.

Corrie will be here tonight, and that’s a memory in the making, one I will do my best to create more of. But… How would I be able to come back to Amsterdam if this whole thing goes south? The idea of being here and knowing it’ll be awkward to see Corrie and the kids is unbearable. The kids wouldn’t know, but I doubt that surprise visits would be an option, if at all. Or calls or video calls or just a few lines of text from a city somewhere. That image of me in a generic, impersonal hotel room somewhere, phone in hand, wondering whether it’s okay to contact Corrie anymore, brings a wave of gloominess that takes over my whole body.

‘Someone scratched your guitar?’ Joey laughs at how this always gets my attention.

Before I know it, tests are done, we change into our show clothes and are backstage. As the crowd fills Paradiso up to the balconies, I scan the unknown faces for the one that matters—at her favorite spot, close to the exit.

‘Just in case I need a bathroom run,’ she joked, when I asked her where she’ll be standing. ‘But I guess I’ll opt for dehydration tonight. I don’t want to miss any of your songs, plus I want to get full value of my free ticket.’

I left two tickets for her, hoping that her plus-one wouldn’t be David, who she hasn’t mentioned since that day, and I made sure to not ask, because then the buts would multiply in a frenzy.

She’s here!

Corrie’s lost in conversation with her plus one–one of her friends, who as far I can tell from here is that Greek-Dutch lady, Dory. I secretly watch my fill, as her expression changes, laughing and thinking and whispering in her friend’s ear.

And then the lights dim and the intro starts to warm everyone up. When I run onstage, skidding on the floor, making everyone laugh, my feet almost don’t touch the ground. As I start playing one of the first songs I wrote for her, everything and everyone blurs, like a photo set on portrait mode, and it’s just me playing only for her, her eyes glued on me.

At that moment, I know I’ll do everything in my power to make things work.

Chapter Twenty-three

Corrie

‘This is Luuk you’re meeting. Your friend Luuk, who has seen you several times already on- and off-screen. Not to mention witnessing your kids’ birth.’

I pep-talk my reflection in the mirror when a certain ch-word tries to make its appearance every time I twirl to check how I look. I’m ordering myself to stop, before I get dizzy, but then comes another whisper in my head.

Don’t you still want a certain someone to be stunned?

I wish my three fairy godmothers were around—nothing like the cock-tales ladies to bring me to my senses—helping this Cinderella here get ready for the ball. My friends don’t even know because I said nothing.

Bea would take offence, because she would consider doubts an insult to her masterpiece. Lola would give me a hug and tell me I look like a dream. And Dory would pepper her praise with fury at the deceased who planted doubt so well in my mind that particles of its roots are still there.

Telling them would mean creating expectations. Which, added to my nerves, would blow this out of proportion and I’m jittery as it is, because this evening feels like the date I’ve been dreaming of for years. Luuk will be here in ten minutes, as per his text, sent right before he left his Airbnb. The kids are at Mom’s who I asked for a night off—technically, not a lie—and she was happy to oblige. We’re supposed to go to some secret place he refused to reveal after profoundly apologizing for not being able to meet me after the concert last evening.

The plan was to meet after the show, which was breathtaking. Scrap that; Luuk was breathtaking as he took the stage like nobody’s business, this beautiful man who makes the crowds rock to his songs, but will never forget my birthday or that of my babies, and has always got a hug for me, be it from afar or near. I couldn’t be prouder of how far he’s come.

His smile lit up the room, while his eyes were looking for me, to send me a barely-there wink, before he took us on a road trip made of notes and lyrics that felt personal not just to him but to each one of us.

‘I bet they are personal, most are made for someone I know,’ Dory insisted.

‘The success of any great song is to make you feel it’s written just for you,’ was my argument, the one put to use on a permanent basis, while my heart was bursting.